On Being Seen

When Emilie Pine’s debut essay collection, the fiercely candid Notes to Self, was first published she didn’t imagine herself as someone breaking a silence. She only knew that she was breaking a fiction – the fiction that she had never been a victim. Revealing and reflecting on sexual violence and violence against the self, and on the taboos around female bodies and female pain, Notes to Self was a liberation in the form of memoir – but it wasn’t the end of the story. In this exhilarating follow-up collection of personal essays, Emilie Pine once again faces up to the seemingly unsayable. She writes about the vulnerabilities of travelling alone; about living with a controlling partner; about what it means to witness trauma, in life and in art; about good and bad sex; about intimacy and its opposites; about love and luck and risk – and all that it means to feel alive. Emilie Pine is a writer whose words make us all feel less alone.